Fair Use: Please note that use of the Netcraft site is
subject to our Fair Use and Copyright policies. For more information,
please visit http://www.netcraft.com/about-netcraft/fair-use-copyright/,
or email info@netcraft.com.

August 2017 Web Server Survey

In the August 2017 survey we received responses from 1,800,566,882 sites and 6,713,340 web-facing computers. This represents a gain of 32.6 million sites (+1.84%) and 120,000 computers (+1.82%).

Continuing its consistently strong performance, nginx once more gained the most web-facing computers, increasing its total by 50,800 (+3.6%). Second-place Microsoft also gained computers (+5,000, +0.3%), albeit much more modestly. As a result, its market share dipped 0.34 percentage points. Apache gained 32,200 web-facing computers (+1.1%), but also saw its share fall, dropping 0.28 percentage points to 42.5%.

The gap in the market share of web-facing computers between nginx and Microsoft has narrowed to 1.13 percentage points. If current trends continue, the number 2 position should be well within nginx's reach before the end of 2017. However, with an almost 20-percentage-point lead over both nginx and Microsoft, market-leader Apache is unlikely to be dethroned anytime soon.

nginx also continues to gain market share amongst the million busiest sites, with 2,200 more top sites seen using the web server this month. Apache's dominant position continues to gradually erode, dropping by 1,700 sites in August. nginx is still a distant second, but for the first time is fewer than 100,000 sites behind. Third-place Microsoft also continues a gradual decline, and after losing a further 980 sites from the top million this month its market share now stands at 9.80%.

Turbulent times for .xyz

.xyz experienced the largest growth among all TLDs this month, gaining websites on over 761k unique domains (+22%). This brought the 7th largest TLD up to over 4 million domains hosting web content. However, it is unlikely to maintain this position for long, with the .xyz zone file losing over 44% of its registered domains shortly after the August survey ran.

The .xyz top-level domain was launched to the public in June 2014 and had reached almost 100,000 domains within the first 10 days after a Network Solutions promotion which gave free matching .xyz domains with each .com domain purchased. This was done on an opt-out basis, with the domains only being free for the first year, causing some confusion the following year when each domain became due for renewal at a cost of $38.

gen.xyz ran another promotion in June 2016 to celebrate its 2 year anniversary. For 2 days .xyz offered domains for just 2¢ (including the ICANN fee), leading to the TLD more than doubling in size after nearly 2.7 million domains were registered. Unsurprisingly, just over one year on, this has led to a dramatic drop in the number of registered .xyz domains; fewer than 1% of the domains created during the event are still registered.